"Lighten up, Dave"

On Saturday I went to a house party in Reading for my friend Andy's 22nd birthday. It was a normal Uni House kind of affair: punch, strangers, vomit, nudity etc. I had a great time but at one point, when the party hit its peak, an old social question re-emerged. The front room was packed with revellers and the centrepiece was the stereo, into which people were plugging their iPods and selecting well-known songs for everyone to dance around to. As I said, I was having a wonderful time, but I couldn't face getting up to dance. It's not that I don't do it - I've been to plenty of allnighters, festivals and dingy raves where I've danced idiotically for hours - it's just that no matter how drunk I get, terrible music is still terrible. I may be having the time of my life, but that won't make me like a shit song.

The music in question was stylistically varied, and although it spent most of the time well within the boundaries of Radio Friendly Rock Music it did occasionally stretch out to some Hip-Hop and Dance Classics from the 90s. Two songs that particularly irked me (as well as coincidentally receiving the most enthusiasm) were Feeder's "All By Myself" and that euphoric electrowank "Ecuador" song from when I was in middle school. For the unfamiliar, Feeder's track is exemplary of their inoffensive and polished take on US Pop Punk, where the "Ecuador" song is a tedious and overplayed rehash of the Euphoric Trance* formula. In my opinion both are pure unadulterated chaff of the highest order, and I won't go into the reasons why.

My body would simply refuse to dance to either of these songs, much like it would refuse to jump from a plane or step off a railway platform. But my question is whether this is wrong, whether this is a pathetically over-earnest and pretentious display of pure artistic obstinacy on my part. I had already played Sly & The Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On, which lasted two and a half songs, and though I've long preached the message that one person's opinion is no more valid than another's, despite how much or little deliberation and research has gone into the forming of that opinion, I cannot think anything other than "Do you seriously prefer Feeder to Sly & The Family Stone... are you insane???" And so while everyone danced and sang the Pop Hits, I sat on the vacated leather sofa, contented, comfortable and without a sour thought towards anybody in the room, yet people kept asking me "Are you alright Dave?", and "Are you sure? You seem a bit off." (It's a good job no one actually used the words "lighten up", which is a phrase that's guaranteed to rile me immediately.) I wasn't "a bit off" at that point, but maybe I am now. I've confronted myself with the possibility that I am a cantankerous elitist, and I don't like it one bit.

But in reality there was no harm done. I didn't like the music, I didn't dance to it, and I didn't bitch and moan about it because I had an awesome night. And besides, would Greil Marcus dance to The Sweet at his niece's Wedding Reception? I fucking doubt it - I'll count myself as one of his followers, and follow him in respectfully sitting out.

Here's Sly & The Family Stone to sing us out (from The Dick Cavett Show in 1970.)

*Further research has revealed that Sash!'s music is in fact Progressive House/Eurodance. I'm fucking sorry I mislabeled it, okay?

The Underground is Infinite!

Ask your friend's Casual Music Fan dad about what "the scene" was like back in the day and listen to his reply. Make a few mental notes - there's probably some very good stuff in there. But take whatever he says with a pinch of salt, because one of the biggest lies you can hear from that generation is this: "There weren't a lot of bands around then, not like there is today."

What he is alluding to is a time when the Hitmaker was also the Visionary, when the Stadium Filler was also the Standard Bearer. The mainstream media offered enough diversity at the turn of the 1970s to satisfy most of the Western world's "proper" music fans (i.e. those who asked more of their listening experience than just to be a soundtrack to the ironing), which in itself is quite remarkable. If you lacked the time or the inclination to look further than a few choice record labels and the latest copy of New Musical Express, you'd still have a pretty damn good record collection on your hands by '76. What they mean by "there weren't a lot of bands around then" is "I didn't really feel like I needed to look for them".

Which is understandable, because looking and finding was fucking hard to do. Underground music from abroad was even less likely to end up in your local record shop than it is today, by a long way. Around the time The Beatles were writing 'Sgt. Pepper...', Paul McCartney would hear about the latest imports from New York arriving at London's hippest outlets. If you had to be in the biggest band in the world to get a heads-up when the new Fugs or Sun Ra record was in stock, what chance did that leave the rest of us?

The irony is that the 21st Century may in fact be the best chance you have of hearing all the music your Casual Dad didn't know existed. Legions of collectors and music nerds have been starting up labels worldwide dedicated to reissuing albums that slipped through the cracks due to a combination of bad management, bad distribution, bad promotion or just outright indifference. None of these factors actually detract from the music itself, which is an injustice. How many times have you thought about that band you know that never quite got the recognition they deserved? They could end up on the 2030 AD equivalent of Repertoire Records being re-released in a digipac, with liner notes written by you.

I picked up a few more of these Lost Gems, Oddities and Groundbreakers recently and I'd like to share them with anyone reading this:

Sir Lord Baltimore - 'Kingdom Come' (1970)


This rocks. Hard. It's utterly brilliant. In fact, it may be one of the definitive recordings in the history of heavy music. This New York three-piece attack every fantastic riff in their repertoire with such gusto and purpose that it actually made me want to abandon my artistic pretenses entirely and spend the rest of my life wailing on an SG, screaming "Yeeeaaaaahhhhh" while being stroked and idolised by an army of nubile young groupie chicks. In a convertible. The vocalist belts out these "mystical woman" lyrics like he's actually spent the last few years doing just that (except that he's also the drummer, not the guitarist). I bought this on the recommendation of Julian Cope's article on his Head Heritage website, and you must read it because he's far better at selling it to you than me.

Malachi - 'Holy Music' (1967)

This reissue from Fallout Records is marketed as one of the earliest psychedelic-themed albums ever recorded, back in Summer 1966. Malachi himself had been transformed into some kind of Zen-like spiritual being (presumably by a combination of drugs, hiking holidays in Mexico and the palpable Spirit Of The Age) and recorded this album with a (future) member of Red Krayola in one evening. I like it, but I don't know why. It consists mainly of quiet, Eastern-themed acoustic meanderings with seemingly random plonks of Jew's Harp over the top. If these two were any calmer when they made this they'd have been asleep. Some vocals come in towards the end of the album I think, but I can't be sure as I tend to actually fall asleep while listening to it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a fair chunk of this record is silence. 'Holy Music' is sonic Diazepam. There's a funny review of it here by someone who knows more than me. I agree with what he says, but I still like this record somehow. (As did Allen Ginsberg apparently, who contributes a respectful soundbite to the album sleeve.)

Brast Burn - 'Debon' (197?)

You know a record is obscure when the reissuing label is appealing for information about it. This is a great expansive mindfuck of an album - no "tracks", no names, no recording info. I wouldn't be surprised if the musicians involved simply vanished after completing it. Needless to say it's mad as fuck in the usual way you'd expect from Japanese experimental music. Minimal ethnic percussion and some very laid-back bass and slide acoustic work are the bedrock for the majority of this album, but I was most disoriented by what's on top of that stuff - sparse Found Sound loops, trickling water, vocals that are a cross between mantra and acid-rock swagger, and queasy out-of-phase synths to name but a few. In the second half they fade one hypnotic melody into another without the first fully disappearing, then back again, if only to mess with our heads (it works). If you ever found yourself thinking "I want to hear some really, really whacked-out shit", this is as good a suggestion as any. (Here is a concise summary, where the reviewer places them quite thought-provokingly between Comus and The Residents.)